Friday, August 01, 2008

You may want to think three times now before taking your personal laptop with you across our border. The Department of Homeland Security in beefing up already intrusive policies, will now leave the option open to take your laptop to an "off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing".

These new policies also allow the agency to share copies of the laptop's contents with "other agencies and private entities" for language translation, data decryption or "other reasons".

"The policies . . . are truly alarming," said Sen. Feingold, who is probing the government's border search practices, and attempting to curb their fascistic tendencies.

Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff set the stage for the policy when he wrote last month that "the most dangerous contraband is often contained in laptop computers or other electronic devices." and that "violent jihadist materials" as well as images of child pornography could be lurking about.

AH HA! That may put other quotes like "other agencies" and "other reasons" into context -- it always comes back to those moralistic right-wingers looking out for our children's welfare. You can't argue with that now, can you?

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